ThinkCentre M75e Review – Part 2 – ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery

As part of my continuing review of the ThinkCentre M75e workstation, the primary thing I am looking at is the usability of the OEM Windows build. One of the features that comes with the ThinkCentre M75e is ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery 4.3.

Rescue and Recovery will prompt to make a backup the system after some use with the default configurations and set a schedule to create the system backup. The screen below is where you can set a schedule for the Rescue and Recovery backup:

Once the schedule is set, the backup moves along swiftly for a default installation. I’ve added only a few programs and the backup took only a minute or so. This is the backup in action:

The one head-scratcher, however is that at no point do you get to configure where your backups go by drive letter. The screen shot above where the backup is specified gives you an option to place the backup file on a USB drive – but no preference for the path – or which drive in the event that multiple drives are in place (note below how it says “to your USB External Storage Device”). After the really quick 1 or 2 minute backup, then a 1 hour task “finishes” the backup; shown below:

Clearly the backup is compiled on local storage as I saw the C:\ drive’s free space decrement during this step. While this 1-hour task was going on, operations were totally unaffected on the system. I could see local disk I/O increasing, but there was no user interaction slowing or choppy playback of rich media. Below is the screen where the schedule and preferences are set:

I still don’t see the backup on my external hard drive, but I have a suspicion they are on the root of the C:\ drive in the \RRbackups folder.

I then ran a task that apparently copied the backup to my USB drive. It was again quite busy doing the backup and hiding all details from me. This shown below:

It is definitely (finally) sending I/O to the USB drive over the USB 2.0 interface as I can see the drive illuminating. After spending on and off around 2 hours with the Rescue and Recovery tool, I can’t see it being something I’d use in the workplace. It isn’t exactly intuitive and no details are given on where and what is being backed up.

My client approach would be to use profile redirection or a tool with centralized management and policy configuration.

Overall on Rescue and Recovery

It is probably pretty good as a free solution, but it isn’t exactly intuitive and doesn’t flow naturally to attached external devices or network drives. I’m going to go another route on the data protection for the system however.